SHEET A-02 / ABOUT
About
Most of what I do comes down to finding the seam between two systems, two departments, or two vendors that need to be talking to each other and aren't yet, and building whatever closes that gap. This page is the longer version of how I ended up doing that for a living.
GENERAL NOTES / BACKGROUND
Background
I studied business administration at the University of Mississippi, which turned out to be more useful later than it felt at the time — most of my job now is translating between people who think in requirements documents and people who think in quarterly numbers, and that started here. A few years after graduating, I made the switch into software, enrolling in Flatiron School's development program in 2020 to actually learn to build the things I'd been specifying.
Flatiron led to Waterfield Technologies, where I landed on the pre-sales and solutions side of a contact-center software company. That job had almost nothing to do with writing code day to day and everything to do with listening — sitting in discovery calls, figuring out what a client's support team actually needed versus what they'd asked for, then building a working demo of it before the deal ever closed. I designed and stood up a dozen of those environments on Twilio Flex, and more than 80% of them turned into paid follow-on work, which told me the discovery part was worth taking seriously.
In 2023 I moved into higher education as a Software Analyst at William Carey University, largely because I wanted to build things that outlasted a single sales cycle. The first real project was automating transcript translation with machine learning and generative AI — a task that used to take the registrar's office a lot of manual hours and now takes a fraction of that. From there I moved to Senior Programmer, building the internal tools platform the university's departments now run on, and in 2025 into Director of Applications and Integrations, where I lead a four-person team and report directly to executive leadership on where the university's systems are headed.
I started an MBA at William Carey in 2024, mostly because the higher I've moved, the more of my week is spent in rooms with a board or a budget in them, and I wanted to be better prepared for those conversations, not just the technical ones.
GENERAL NOTES / METHOD
How I work
Discovery before architecture. The Waterfield years left a permanent mark here. I'd rather spend an extra week understanding how a registrar's office, a support team, or a finance department actually works before I design anything for them. Most integration failures I've seen trace back to a wrong assumption made in week one, not a technical mistake made in week six.
Build the platform, not just the project. When I built the internal tools platform on Blazor and ASP.NET, the ask was for one tool. I built the scaffolding underneath it instead, because I knew there would be a second request three months later — there always is. It's slower up front and faster for everyone after.
Teach the team the thing, not just the fix. I run hands-on training in the languages my team actually touches day to day — Python, SQL, HTML, CSS, and the ASP Classic still holding some legacy systems together — because I'd rather spend a Tuesday afternoon teaching than spend every Friday being the only person who can fix something.
Say the hard thing plainly. Board updates and risk assessments are only useful if they're honest about what's behind schedule and why. I'd rather deliver a status update that's uncomfortable and accurate than one that's smooth and wrong.
SHEET A-02 / A CLOSER LOOK
A closer look
Moving a university off an on-premises Student Information System means every downstream integration — admissions, financial aid, registrar, advising — has to be re-mapped against the new platform without breaking mid-semester. I'm directing that migration alongside 8 new third-party vendor integrations running in parallel, which means most weeks are spent sequencing dependencies: which vendor's API has to be stable before another team can build against it, and which legacy workaround has to survive one more semester before it can finally be retired.
Transfer students arrive with transcripts from other institutions, each with its own formatting, terminology, and course-credit conventions, and translating them into something the university's systems could use was a slow, manual task for the registrar's office. I applied machine learning and generative AI to automate that translation step, cutting processing effort by about 98% and letting incoming students get credit decisions back faster.
A contact-center engagement was going sideways and close to being lost entirely. I stepped in, ran a fast round of re-discovery to figure out where the original scope had drifted from what the client actually needed, and redesigned the solution around that. The engagement didn't just survive — it expanded into two additional phases, and it's the project that taught me most of what's in the "how I work" section above.
SHEET A-02 / EDUCATION
Education
- Leadership, project management, strategic thinking, and team collaboration, alongside a full-time director role.
- API development, frontend development, information security, algorithms, and software architecture.
- Concentration in Business Administration.
Want the shorter version, or the day-to-day work itself? See the revision log, or get in touch.